6 New Paperbacks to Read This Week

Ellison, a major figure in 20th-century science fiction, died in 2018. His short stories, some of which provided the basis for episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “ripped my mind open and showed me what the possibilities of fiction were,” Neil Gaiman writes in the foreword to this new collection of Ellison’s best-known work.

When her former stepmother Jean dies and leaves Leah the sculptures she spent her final years creating, Leah returns to Appalachia, where the two once lived together. Contending with “ambivalence and complexity and discomfort,” our reviewer wrote, this novel traces their relationship over the course of Leah’s life and across divides of generation and class.

In March 2018, Jennifer and Sarah Hart drove off a cliff with their eight Black children strapped in. No one survived. Asgarian’s investigation tells the harrowing story of the white married couple’s actions and lays bare the injustices of the foster care system that enabled them.

The British-Bangladeshi conservationist celebrates birding as an activity that can, “even just for moments at a time, lift our eyes away from our lives and up to the skies.”

Perhaps because Akuany, the young woman who is the “beating heart” of this novel set during the Ottoman Empire’s decline in late-1800s Sudan, has spent most of her life forced to move from house to house, she feels most at home in the water. In between her desire for freedom and her feelings for the merchant who once rescued her lies “a love story that endures in a time of cruelty and punishment,” our reviewer wrote.

This history of Ukraine’s 2013-14 Maidan revolution, named for Kyiv’s Independence Square, where thousands of demonstrators were brutally repressed, was first published in 2018, before the Russian invasion. In an updated preface, Shore writes that it was at the Maidan where “Ukrainian society as it now exists was born.”